A Stable Way of Typing

[Metamorph]

I propose a stable way of typing: look at someone's media consumption and pick out the themes in it. That stuff won't change under observation and it won't change dramatically if they become obsessed with typology (they might learn new things from their typology friends but they probably won't be night and day from what they already like.) When I first came to this site some Russians were using images, music, etc. to type people in socionics, but they were just looking for superficial qualities or technical aspects of the images when it would be much easier to have a few archetypal themes and proliferate them, never mind the fact that that kind of excessively detail-oriented work is missing the point of everything ever. "Archetype" was originally a natural sciences term anyways, referring to the original species in a genus, original rock of a type, etc. back in Romantic science. Big Five seems to have largely been validated this way and I'm going to be looking into how they did it mostly just because it will be cool. If the archetypes of socionics, enneagram, etc. can be validated this way, we can actually make psychology empirical instead of a method of social control that is effective on masses of stupid people or for impressing a certain kind of person you probably don't want to impress at cocktail parties, and useless for much anything else.

[Singu]

The problem with typology "tests" like MBTI is that the test result change over time, since people change over time, and hence it makes the test results inconsistent.

Big Five tried to "solve" this problem by trying to find traits that are apparently consistent over time and over different cultures.

But what would you do with that data exactly? You might correlate high Extraversion/high Neuroticism with political beliefs or something, but it's also like, so what? Yeah it's correlated, and it might be kind of interesting, but its uses are somewhat limited. It doesn't gain into a psychological understanding of why people do things.

Apparently its uses is that it "predicts" people's behavior... by saying that people (or certain limited traits) stay the same and consistent throughout time. Which isn't really that much great of a prediction.

[Metamorph]

The problem with typology "tests" like MBTI is that the test result change over time, since people change over time, and hence it makes the test results inconsistent.

Big Five tried to "solve" this problem by trying to find traits that are apparently consistent over time and over different cultures.

But what would you do with that data exactly? You might correlate high Extraversion/high Neuroticism with political beliefs or something, but it's also like, so what? Yeah it's correlated, and it might be kind of interesting, but its uses are somewhat limited. It doesn't gain into a psychological understanding of why people do things.

Apparently its uses is that it "predicts" people's behavior... by saying that people (or certain limited traits) stay the same and consistent throughout time. Which isn't really that much great of a prediction.

MBTI sucks and is mostly a bunch of people smelling their own farts and discussing it at length on forums. No one has broken down MBTI types without switching to Jung types, though some Jung type users prefer MBTI's ordering of functions (something that should be testable if such types exist.) In reality they are mostly arbitrary ugly stereotypes that should just be ignored even if they have some basis somewhere because it's not a good use of effort. Socionics and enneagram, as well as all Jungian systems, have some academic research on them even if it's not of much use now.

[Metamorph]

Oh, would anyone here consider publishing a paper on whichever psychological typology you're most interested in to an academic journal or publishing a book? You don't actually need a degree in your field or any other to get published, just references to others' work, which I figure many of you here already have with how much stuff some of you read about typology. Academia in America and many other countries isn't vaguely meritocratic and that's the problem and amateurs have discovered all sorts of things throughout history. When I publish something on linguistics I'll post it here so you can reference it but I'm only posting if you post first. I know at least one user I should call out but I won't because I'm polite.

[Metamorph]

@Singu you are not said user but please publish in a philosophy of science journal and/or science journal instead of spending all your time arguing here. Thanks!

[EUDAEMONIUM]

I propose a stable way of typing: look at someone's media consumption and pick out the themes in it. That stuff won't change under observation and it won't change dramatically if they become obsessed with typology (they might learn new things from their typology friends but they probably won't be night and day from what they already like.) When I first came to this site some Russians were using images, music, etc. to type people in socionics, but they were just looking for superficial qualities or technical aspects of the images when it would be much easier to have a few archetypal themes and proliferate them, never mind the fact that that kind of excessively detail-oriented work is missing the point of everything ever. "Archetype" was originally a natural sciences term anyways, referring to the original species in a genus, original rock of a type, etc. back in Romantic science. Big Five seems to have largely been validated this way and I'm going to be looking into how they did it mostly just because it will be cool. If the archetypes of socionics, enneagram, etc. can be validated this way, we can actually make psychology empirical instead of a method of social control that is effective on masses of stupid people or for impressing a certain kind of person you probably don't want to impress at cocktail parties, and useless for much anything else.

This is a common way to profile people in data analytics, it's accurate as well. There may be something to learn from a person by what they consume but I'm not sure how valuable that will be in terms of who they are in the socion. Socionics is a logically consistent system, however that does not mean it is empirical in any way. From your confidence about how to publish findings, you sound as if your an academic of some kind so I'm sure you know that the Big Five were traits that were gathered a posteriori from data they had collected. Socionics is an a priori system that has yet to be validated empirically. There are many elements to Scoionics where there is no evidence for their existence. Socionics is not an empirical system and applying empirical measures to validate socionics is a backward way of gathering data and will likely lead to false positives.
With that being said, the human mind is not beholden to laws of nature, people can believe whatever they want to believe; this make psychology hard to make purely empirical. Is there an actual biological concept of Fe or Te? Is there any actual evidence for a dichotomy between Fe/Ti and Te/Fi? No, not at all. But we can understand them and make sense of this system because we understand that we all have a role in society. Archetypes are not an empirical fact, when we link cultural artifacts like masks to certain archetypes this is a valuation that is not inherent in the object itself it is a link we made ourselves. Nevertheless, the human mind makes these things real to us without fact.

TLDR:
Psychology needs loose intuitive associations separate from empirical fact to latch meaning onto. Meaning is a psychological concept that has no inherent empirical nature. Meaning can only be derived from metaphysical concepts. Socionics is metaphysical and cannot in good faith be empirically determined.


Also, psychology is a method of social control, there are many other methods of social control. Methods of social control will never go away, they are the buttresses of civilization.

[sbbds]

I think the only way to do socionics properly is to build your own bank of experience and work through that logically, before trying to cross-reference with the experience of others. You can't create a balanced math equation if everybody else keeps changing the numbers around. Likewise, you can't create stable building blocks without some level of solitude from the comments and opinions of others.

[Metamorph]

Psychology can be empirical. Meaning is a word for teleology, like what the end purpose of something is.

[Aramas]

Problem is that people often have media preferences outside their own quadra. Enneagram affects media choice as well. This isn't a reliable method.

[Metamorph]

Media doesn't only belong to one quadra. Inter-quadra relationships are normal and media is produced with normal relationships in mind. It's not produced only for basement dwellers, generally speaking. What would be better would be to look at the semantics of the words associated with people's cluster of preferences. I believe that is objective. If someone likes romances, that is probably about relationships and Fi, for example. If someone only likes romances with vampires, there might be something else in play, but if someone also likes sitcoms (showing the evolution of relationships over time) that's definitely Fi. If someone likes action, that's probably Se, and if someone likes cooking shows, that's probably Si. People are not going to change what they watch or read suddenly just because you give them a type unless they're just too crazy to have a type, in which case they probably watch and read nothing anyways and you found the latent type.